The Christianism Of The Left
Meet James Talarico, the next generation's religious crusader for woke illiberalism.
The fusion of religion and politics — the norm for almost all human civilizations until liberalism came along — is having a moment in the sun right now. We are, after all, fighting a new war started by fundamentalist Jews against fundamentalist Muslims alongside fundamentalist Christians. Lovely apocalypse we’re having, innit?
But this is not, pace Hitch, a reason for abandoning faith. For some of us, it is, rather, a reason to save faith from the logic of power, where it is always corrupted. That was the original promise of America: the separation of church and state. (It was also, I’d argue, the anti-political theme of the Gospels — but that’s another story.)
A couple of decades ago I called the fusion of evangelicalism and Republican politics in America “Christianism” (political) — to distinguish it from Christianity (spiritual). Deducing from the Gospels the need to vote Republican, lower taxes, drill baby drill, ban abortion, hate homosexuals, and defend wars of aggression made no sense to me.
But the fusion of Christianity and politics isn’t exclusively right-wing. You can invoke God to defend anything, after all. And a new left-Christianism has emerged in the 21st century that is a mirror image of the right’s. Left-Christians have come to adorn their churches with transqueer and BLM flags, treat NPR as the Holy Office, adopt language — “white supremacy,” “cis-heterosexism,” “patriarchy” — directly from critical theory, and interpret Scripture to mandate higher taxes, DEI, abortion on demand, and open borders. I find that Christianism just as toxic to faith and politics.
Which brings me to James Talarico, the Christianist running for Senate in Texas. After defeating the race-baiting Jasmine Crockett, the MSM is framing him as a “moderate”. To be sure, I’d vote for Talarico in an instant if I were a Texan (restraining the mad king is vital this fall). He’s also a clear speaker, a man of real faith (Democrats need more like him), and a man rightly revolted by the indecency of Trump. He engages Trump voters, including Joe Rogan, and was one of very few Dems to call out Biden’s disastrous record on immigration. All awesome.
But he is also a defiantly woke Christianist: a man fusing the agenda of the far left with Christian theology. He was brought up in Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, a woke congregation in deep-blue Austin, where the Gospel about Peter’s denial of Jesus last week was followed thus:
The preacher ... spoke of her own experience living in denial, both in 12-step programs and — due to her internalized homophobia — as a lesbian in a cisgendered, patriarchal world. She then made a sudden switch to talking about Germany in the Thirties, and the parallels with modern America. She performed all the classics: Hitler, Trump, the patriarchy, Pastor Niemöller, the threat of Christian nationalism and, at the end, threw in a bit of “No Kings” for good measure.
This is not atypical in many liberal churches, where prayers for an end to “white supremacy” are routine. So it is no surprise to find that Talarico went to seminary “because I had a pretty big crisis of faith in our political system.” (My italics.) Nor is it surprising that when asked to offer an invocation as a pastor in the Texas legislature, he began:
“Holy mystery, you have so many names.” He cycled through the monikers for God in Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism before arriving at the New Testament’s declaration that God is love.
And in Talarico’s church of woke, Jesus’s teachings are identical to that of a left-wing Democrat of precisely March 2026:
Christ is the immigrant deported without due process. Christ is the senior deprived of their Social Security benefits. Christ is the protestor kidnapped in an unmarked vehicle by plain clothes officers.
According to Talarico, Jesus would have been particularly upset by the end of Roe vs Wade:
This summer, more than half our population became second-class citizens. Every one of our neighbors with a uterus became the property of the state. And nothing — nothing — is more un-Christian than that.
Really? This is the same Talarico who says that Jesus said nothing about gays and so we should not bring him into the discussion. But Jesus didn’t talk about 20th century American judicial philosophy either, did he? In another amazing tidbit, Talarico used the Annunciation — God’s telling Mary she would bear His only son — as a teaching moment about “consent” in sex. That’s a scene from Portlandia. On race, Talarico believes that original sin and your original skin are one and the same:
White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus [of racism]. But we spread it wherever we go — through our words, our actions, and our systems. We don’t have to be showing symptoms — like a white hood or a Confederate flag — to be contagious.
The only way this argument works is by an understanding of society as entirely a function of oppressive “systems”, which liberal norms only mask and perpetuate. That’s (atheist) critical race theory, where racial fatalism always trumps hope. But not Christianity, in which all of us are simply human and always redeemable.
In the church of woke, there is also a sacred caste, and Talarico is their tribune. The saints are the oppressed, made saintly by who they are and not how they act. (There’s a lot of predestination in wokeness.) You may have noticed that in Talarico’s quote about Roe vs Wade, he refers to women as “our neighbors with a uterus.” When he occasionally slips and uses the w-word, he wants us to know “it should not be understood as an exhaustive term, but rather as a lens through which to understand, examine, and interrogate patriarchy.”
Nothing, of course, is more sacred in the church of woke than trans. “God is nonbinary,” Talarico has declared, and “there are six sexes” Only six? He favors irreversible sex changes for children before puberty, sports where our neighbors with uteruses compete against our neighbors without them, and strongly believes that “our trans community needs abortion care too.” “Abortion care.”
Like many fundamentalists, Talarico also bungles the science. Here he is saying that not transing a child before puberty risks suicide — which even the trans activists have stopped saying because it’s a lie — and that the rate of intersex conditions is the same as that for green eyes. Around two percent of humans have green eyes; only 0.02 percent have DSDs. Trusting your religion over science is no better on the left than on the right.
When once asked to think of people he loved beyond family and friends, Talarico replied: “I love ... the trans children who showed up yesterday at the state capitol to advocate for their humanity.” I’ve borrowed Eric Kaufmann’s term “sacralization” to describe how the woke view the oppressed, but Talarico openly declares that, for him, “trans children … are perfect. They are beautiful and they are sacred.”
In many ways, wokeness is best seen as a fusion of neo-Marxist critical theory and New England Christian puritanism: a very American religious movement dressed up in distressingly political garb. This left-Christianism is as fundamentalist and as illiberal as any political evangelicalism. And that’s why the Democrats are not going to adjust one iota on culture-war issues. They are just going to tell the voters to ignore them because they don’t matter. This is Talarico’s core message:
There’s another war in the Middle East. There’s a cost of living crisis crushing the middle class. There’s a secret pedophile ring and no one has been prosecuted. So the people responsible are trying to distract us with the same old culture wars ... what do the American people care more about — pronouns or prices?
It doesn’t seem to occur to Talarico that voters care about both economics and culture, prices and pronouns — that both matter. That’s surely what we have learned in the Trump years. And then you realize the Democrats have learned nothing in the Trump years. Because their religion requires it.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a fierce but friendly debate with Eli Lake over Israel and the war; many many dissents over my views on the war; eight notable quotes from the week in news, including an Yglesias Award for Dan Savage; 17 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of a ska version of Rage Against the Machine; a towering window in Tel Aviv; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
A paid subscriber writes:
I roll my eyes at my fellow Zionists who apparently can’t handle reading criticism of Israel and cancel their Dish subscriptions. It doesn’t seem very Israeli in spirit, frankly. Or Jewish! Argument for the sake of heaven, anyone? I appreciate that you frequently print dissents on this topic, and while I also sometimes roll my eyes at what you write, I have no plans to cancel my subscription over your views on this topic or any other.
If you’d like to balance out some of the cancelled subs, please do! We always publish opposing views to mine, which makes cancellation a bit much. A new subscriber just paid up “because people are complex, and our conversations should be too.”
Back On The Dishcast: Eli Lake On The War!
Eli is a journalist and an old friend. He’s a former senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek, and a former columnist for the Bloomberg View. He’s now a reporter for The Free Press, a contributing editor at Commentary Magazine, and the host of his own podcast, Breaking History. He’s one of the most dogged defenders of Israel in America. Who better to slug it out with?
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the double standard of US aid to Israel and NATO, and escalation of settlements in the West Bank. That link also takes you to commentary on our pods with Kathryn Paige Harden and Sally Quinn, plus a ton of dissent and other debate on the war in the Middle East.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Matt Goodwin on the political earthquake in the UK, Jeffrey Toobin on the pardon power, Derek Thompson on abundance, Jonah Goldberg on the state of conservatism, Tom Holland on the Christian roots of liberalism, Tiffany Jenkins on privacy in a liberal democracy, and Adrian Wooldridge on “the lost genius of liberalism.” As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Dissents Of The Week
A reader responds to my latest column on the war:
How about simply understanding that having an Iran with fearsome weapons they are willing to use is bad for America because it’s bad for world order. A country willing to shoot hundreds of thousands of its own citizens over the years won’t hesitate to send ballistic missiles and nuclear devices to anywhere it wants — if it can. Trump saw an opportunity to either take out the regime or to reduce the threat before it was unstoppable, which it would have been in another year or two. Why is that bad?
Just because Israel benefits from a change of regime or a reduced threat doesn’t mean that it doesn’t also benefit the US. Israel has largely fought Iran by itself for more than 25 years, which has delayed the nuclear program and reduced the expansion of the missile program. What Israel has done vis-a-vis Iran helps the world, and I’m grateful for their grit in keeping Iran at bay.
There are, of course, fair critiques of this war. And there are certainly many instances of every US administration (including Trump) being at odds with Israel. But your (obsessive, conspiratorial) view that Israel is manipulating strong actors like Trump or Rubio doesn’t pass the smell test. It just happens that on Iran, the US and Israeli interests are perfectly aligned.
In my column I specifically denied any notion of conspiracy. This is a normal domestic lobby practicing politics very, very effectively. For the sake of Israel.
Two more dissents, with my replies, are here. Many more are on the pod page. As always, please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com. And follow more Dish debate in my Notes feed.
In The ‘Stacks
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the dire situation in Hormuz, new speech threats in UK, and signs that the kids aren’t doing well. Below is one example, followed by a brand new substack:
Hannah Spier details “seven problems with the claim that borderline personality is caused by abuse.”
Eric Randolph, one of few foreign journalists living in Iran in the late 2010s, starts a ‘stack.
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month sub if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the VFYW). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Last week our previous winner in Sherman Oaks wrote:
This week’s contest reminded me of a cool movie that came out in 1990 called State of Grace, with an awesome cast that included Sean Penn, Ed Harris, and an epic performance from Gary Oldman. (I was working my way through college at a movie theater at the time and always watched the indie movies when they came out.)
State of Grace recalled a time when Hell’s Kitchen was being transformed from an Irish Mob stronghold in the ‘80s to a yuppie outpost for those getting priced out of the Upper West Side. Not many people saw the movie, partly because it was a small independent release by Orion Pictures, and it shared its opening weekend with Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Roger Ebert gave it a good review and especially loved the performances, but when compared to the Goodfellas, every gangster movie falls short:
If all you know from Gary Oldman are Batman films and Slow Horses, you are missing out. From his debut in Sid and Nancy on through to Prick Up Your Ears, JFK, Romeo Is Bleeding, and True Romance, Oldman steals the movie even if he’s only in one scene.
See you next Friday.